US airman's spy charge dropped

Ahmad al-Halabi spent 10 months in prison before being tried

US military prosecutors have dropped allegations of spying made against a Syrian-born senior airman working as a translator at Guantanamo Bay.

Espionage charges against Ahmad al-Halabi were dropped after he agreed to plead guilty to lesser offences.

The 25-year-old was an interpreter for terror suspects at the US military jail at Guantanamo Bay when he was arrested.

The US military was earlier forced to drop similar charges levelled against two other employees at the jail.

Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested for espionage and then convicted of smaller offences.

A court later quashed all the convictions against him and he left the military in August.

Last week, the US army also dropped charges Jackie Duane Farr, a colonel accused of removing classified documents from the base in Cuba.

Pictures and lies

Mr Halabi was arrested in July 2003 after working at the camp for nine months.

He faced the death penalty for the 30 charges initially made against him, which related to alleged attempts to pass classified information about the military prison and its inmates to Syria.

Many of these charges were later dropped.

In exchange for having the espionage allegations withdrawn, Mr Halabi pleaded guilty to taking two photographs of his office and lying about these pictures.

He also admitted he had taken a classified document home but told the judge he did not know he was committing an offence at the time.

The case against Mr Halabi suffered a major setback earlier this month, when the military acknowledged that letters from detainees handled by him were not classified, as had originally been alleged.

Mr Halabi, a naturalised US citizen hailed by his squadron as airman of the year in 2001, spent 10 months in prison before his case came to trial.

Guantanamo Bay is home to hundreds of terror suspects, most of them held without trial after being rounded up in the US campaign against Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.